America’s College Kids Are a Bunch of Mollycoddled Babies

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry over the demand by U.S. college students for “trigger warnings” to alert them that something they’re about to read or see in one of their classes might traumatize them—apparently a new trend, according to the New York Times. Ditto for off-beat campus sculptures, placards displayed by protesters and more.

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Poor dears. These are the same kids who would riot in the streets if their colleges asserted any form of in loco parentis when it comes to such old-fashioned concerns as inebriation and fornication. God forbid they should be treated as responsible, independent adults! After all, they’re old enough to vote, to drive, even (though it’s unlikely) to join the army.

Yet they want their professors to shield their precious eyes from anything potentially offensive. In the words of a course-syllabus guide produced by Oberlin College’s Sexual Offense Policy Task Force, that means flagging “all forms of violence” and examples of “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” Although the Oberlin faculty has temporarily tabled the document, the school’s Office of Equity Concerns already admonishes instructors to “take steps to make the classroom more inclusive for … individuals of all genders, gender identities, gender expressions and sexual orientations.”

Just how, aside from inviting all of one’s students to take their seats, is a teacher supposed to manage that? Does the history professor refrain from mentioning that Hitler killed homosexuals as well as Jews? Does the English teacher shun James Baldwin and George Eliot because one was gay and the other was a woman using a man’s name? Avoid Toni Morrison because one of her books includes a rape scene? Not teach astronomy because just two of the 23 best-known constellations are recognizably female? When you think about it, almost any subject, perhaps save for pure math, could make some student feel less than fully included on grounds that have something vaguely to do with gender.

And that’s not the end of it. In March, a pregnant prof at the University of California, Santa Barbara tried to wreck signs wielded by anti-abortion protesters showing aborted fetuses. The professor was charged with vandalism—but then was supported by 1,000 student petitioners who demanded the university crack down on “potentially trigger-inducing content,” according to the Times. Meanwhile, hundreds of young women at Wellesley College asserted this past winter that a piece of art—a statue of an underwear-clad man—should be removed from the campus because it “has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”

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Yes, obviously, abortion and sexual assault are serious, delicate issues, but part of going to college and becoming an adult is learning to deal with different points of view, unfamiliar kinds of art, conflicting opinions on the human condition. As a Wall Street Journal columnist reminded us the other day, “No consequential idea ever failed to offend someone.” Should colleges exclude such ideas in favor of political correctness?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.